SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the Harvard Business IdeaCast. I’m Sarah Green from harvardbusiness.org, and I’m here today with Professor Leslie Perlow from the Harvard Business School. She is co-author of the Harvard Business Review article, “Making Time Off Predictable and Required,” in the October 2009 issue. And today we’ll be discussing her research on the effects of predictable time off. Professor Perlow, thank you so much for joining us.

PROFESSOR LESLIE PERLOW: Thanks for inviting me.

SARAH GREEN: Let’s start by discussing some of your research findings. Can you tell us a little bit about the scope of the study and what you were hoping to find?

PROFESSOR LESLIE PERLOW: So I’m very intrigued by the fact that people are always on. And by that I mean that they are either at work working, or walking around carrying their BlackBerry, their cell phone, constantly checking it. Go to a kid’s soccer game and see how many of the parents are actually on. At the airport, walking down the street.

I always make the analogy to the medical world, where doctors are on, or on call, or they know ahead of time when they’re going to be off. In the business world, we don’t really have a comparable concept of being off and knowing ahead of time when you’ll be off.

And so the purpose of this research was to actually ask the question, in the business context, could we create predictable time off?

SARAH GREEN: So before we get further into that, I’m curious to know what exactly you mean by time off, because isn’t a weekend time off?

PROFESSOR LESLIE PERLOW: So there’s lots of time off in everybody’s lives, including the consultants that I studied. But there’s a very big difference between looking back and saying, oh, nothing came up last night or over the weekend, versus knowing ahead of time, this evening or this weekend, I know long in advance I can make plans and nothing will interrupt.

SARAH GREEN: You mentioned that you got the idea for this experiment in part from medical doctors and their schedule, and I wonder if you have done any sort of comparison research with medical doctors.

PROFESSOR LESLIE PERLOW: So there were two ways that the comparison to medical doctors came up. At one, I actually had a graduate student, who’s now on the faculty at MIT, who was studying surgery residents and the mandated change to the 80-hour work week. So there was a lot of thinking about the medical world.

But simultaneously, my key contact, and the woman who did the first experiment, at BCG’s husband is a doctor. And when I started talking about trying to study on and on call, she was the one who really emphasized, but it’s off that we want. And she’s the one who then started drawing this connection, because my husband has off, I want off, too.

SARAH GREEN: When you started working on this research, how was the company you were working with– were they receptive to taking time off and implementing this experiment, or were they kind of nervous about it?

PROFESSOR LESLIE PERLOW: So I’d spent a year and a half first observing what they did, so I had a lot of rapport with them. I had a key contact there who had been extremely supportive. And when it came time to actually implement the experiments, and nobody else wanted to be first, I turned to her and said, well, you’re an officer in the firm, we can try it with your team.

And she talks about now just how nervous she was, and what it was like to have to be the first experiment, what it was like to tell the client that we were going to actually undertake this experiment. And yet, it’s interesting, she’s now turned into one of our greatest advocates, because the process was so effective and she was so skeptical going in.

SARAH GREEN: Well, let’s talk a bit about the process and what actually happened when you started this experiment.

PROFESSOR LESLIE PERLOW: So, after spending a year and a half observing them, the first experiment was that they would have a day off. And a key component of the experiment was that every member of the team would have one day off.

And so, what we did is we took a team that had four people on it and added an additional person so everyone would be working 80%. We did that for the duration of their assignment with the client. It was so successful that we then went on and translated it into doing it a night off a week.

And the reason we did that– because in some ways it might seem like we’re doing less, not more– is because this is a problem of always being on that applies to everyone in the work force, not just the subset of people who are actually interested in working part-time. And as a result, because the findings had been so powerful, we wanted to understand would it be possible to do this with a night off a week.

The night off a week was in turn so successful that I was ready to go home and write about what I had learned, and BCG had the foresight to say, wait a minute, this is pretty powerful stuff, let’s actually create an initiative around it. So something they weren’t necessarily interested in at all when I approached them– I went strictly as a researcher who was just going to sort of explore what they were doing– has subsequently become a major initiative for them.

At this point, they’ve had 75 teams involved in this, drawing from people across 31 of their offices around the globe, and it’s something that they’re continuing to roll out.

SARAH GREEN: So when you say that BCG felt these results were really successful, and you have described them also has powerful, what are the results? What was so successful?

PROFESSOR LESLIE PERLOW: So, the specific value of a night off was certainly recognized. People would talk about actually being able to go on a date or hire a babysitter, to make plans to buy tickets to a sporting event or to the theater during the week. But that was very small compared to the real substantial benefit, which was, as people engaged collectively in trying to make it possible for every member of their team to have a day and ultimately a night off, they had to rethink the way they worked.

And it was the rethinking of the work that caused them to challenge very basic assumptions about how they were working and to end up working not just more efficiently, but more effectively, more creatively, more collaboratively.

SARAH GREEN: So tell me a little bit more about some of the personal, individual, for lack of a better term, call them mental health benefits, that this time off had on your subjects.

PROFESSOR LESLIE PERLOW: So I think that the benefits were twofold. One, there was a set of benefits because they actually had this time off. And I have to tell you, we’re a culture where people don’t necessarily know what to do with time off. And at first, people weren’t sure if they really liked the time off.

They were resistant about having a day off in the middle of the week. Over time, they became really used to this and came to love it. And in fact, people would say over and over, please don’t put me on a team now that doesn’t have a night off.

And why? The adjectives they used to describe it were it was helpful, it was fun, it was restful, it was relaxing. You could be a Boston team member in Minneapolis having your night off, and people weren’t sure they wanted their night off in Minneapolis.

And yet, they came to realize there’s a lot of things that they could do, including a lot of conversations with family and friends that they wouldn’t have had otherwise, just because they had this downtime, working out, actually eating dinner at an hour that they would like to be eating dinner. So there was a lot of benefits in that way.

I also think there were a tremendous amount of benefits from being on a team that was really engaged in reflecting on their work process. So we talked about this difference between good intensity and bad intensity. Good intensity is something these people thrive on.

They go into the job because it is intense, because there’s adrenaline, because it’s high pressure. But what they don’t like is all the unpredictability, all the last-minute requests, all of the sense that they’re wasting time, that they’re doing things that are inefficient, that they’re, in their words, boiling the ocean, or doing 110% when they really don’t think it’s necessary.

And by being able to have the conversation and talk about this and talk about how it was going to affect their night off, they suddenly were much more engaged in what they were doing and felt much more positive about the whole team experience.

SARAH GREEN: So, when you talk about these gains for individuals, you’re saying that they had an aggregated effect for the whole team?

PROFESSOR LESLIE PERLOW: So I think that any individual can decide on their own to create predictable time off. And, as a result, they will become more efficient. But to me, that’s nothing more than good individual time management. And by the way, for many of us, it won’t even be that easy to do, because we are so dependent on other people and other people are dependent on us, that it’s very hard to decide I will have predictable time off, nobody’s going to interrupt me, and then what are you going to do when someone needs you?

The value of this was they were all engaged in it together, and so they actually would have these conversations on a weekly basis, trying to understand what was required to get the work done. And in those conversations, they began, as a team, to rethink how they were actually doing their work.

SARAH GREEN: OK, so in that case, I accept that it’s beneficial for individuals, I accept that it’s beneficial for the team as a whole, but what about the client? Was BCG’s client satisfied with people putting in 80% instead of 110%?

PROFESSOR LESLIE PERLOW: We were under that, too. And in the day-off-a-week experiment, where the client was a big deal, because they actually were not seeing people five days a week. Suddenly, they were seeing them four days a week. And this was an on-site project, so the client really did notice that their people weren’t there.

And I should note, in consulting you’re on-site four days a week, and Fridays you’re in the office. We did not let them have Friday be a day off, so it had to be a day off that they would normally be with a client.

Afterwards, we interviewed every member of the client that had had any contact with the consulting firm, and everyone was either neutral or positive about the effect it had had, because the team members had a broader, richer understanding of the problem through their conversations with each other about what was going on.

And as a result, they felt that the deliverable was of higher quality. And the subsequent night-off-a-week teams, we didn’t actually interview the client, but we did interview the partners who were involved. And they had no particular investment in this initiative, and yet reported, repeatedly, the quality of the work they felt was higher, and the number of times they had received comments from their clients about aspects of the work that were substantially better or improved based on– that they attributed to the experiment.

SARAH GREEN: So what you’re saying is that not only were individual people perhaps experiencing some mental health benefits from taking time off, but that the quality of the output was actually higher at 80% effort than it was at 110% effort?

PROFESSOR LESLIE PERLOW: Yes.

SARAH GREEN: Wow. So that sounds great, but so why isn’t this the way that most organizations are run?

PROFESSOR LESLIE PERLOW: So I think what we discovered was a process that’s extremely valuable and one that most organizations would benefit from. And that is an integration of an emphasis on managing to a constraint that causes people to experiment and challenge assumptions and rethink how they are working, and simultaneously creating space for open dialog.

There’s lots of research and practitioners trying to experiment with work life options. There’s a whole other field of organization development, and a subarea within that all about creating open dialog. But nobody in the past has put those two together and really tried to create space for open dialog beyond just the work life initiative, so maybe we should step back and talk for a minute about what we did when we actually created this open dialog.

We, every week, required people to be present, which in and of itself– we’re going to have a meeting. Every single member of the team has to be there every week, and you’re required to partake in what we called a post-check, which was a discussion of process.

So we had it such that everyone on the team would answer the following questions every week. How are you feeling? How do you feel about the value you’re delivering to the client? What about your own learning? And is this way of working sustainable?

We also asked them to anonymously report their tummy rumbles. And so now, suddenly, they had to have a conversation about the process.

SARAH GREEN: So, in a way, it’s not necessarily about the time off. It’s about the conversations and communication that improved as a result of forcing people to take some time off.

PROFESSOR LESLIE PERLOW: Yes and no. It’s definitely more than just the time off, but you would be mistaken to walk away thinking, so why bother with the time off to begin with?

The time off was an extremely important catalyst that enabled these really productive conversations. And there have been teams that have tried at BCG to skip the time off, and it never works.

And so, the data’s pretty interesting, to compare the teams that actually have tried to engage in an experiment without a night off and just have open dialog, versus the ones who have really tried to create the synergy.

And the reason why is that time off provides something for people to talk about. It gets this positive spiral going in terms of people talking. And also, now they continue to talk not just about work, but also work life issues.

And so, not just night off, or whatever the predictable time is, but now any range of issues are coming up, both about work and work life, which are constantly creating inspiration and topics to be discussed, and that are causing us to continue to challenge the way we work.

SARAH GREEN: So if some of our listeners wanted to experiment with some of this in their own organization or on their own teams, are there any pitfalls that you would caution them to look out for, anything they should be thinking about while they try to implement this?

PROFESSOR LESLIE PERLOW: I think it’s critical to keep three things in mind. One, you need to have a constraint. You need to have everybody involved in managing to that constraint. Otherwise, there’s going to be stigma attached.

This constraint has to be something that is at odds with they way you currently do your work. And, suddenly, people aren’t going to cheat if it’s not everybody involved. So you have to have a constraint. It has to be narrow, concrete, measurable, some way for people to actually know if they’re succeeding, and to point fingers at people who aren’t engaged so that we all engage in it.

It has to be in a person’s interest. And, simultaneously, you have to create the space to have the conversation. But if you try to do either of these without the other, or if you try to do either of these without leadership support and buy-in, people aren’t going to be willing to take the risks.

And it’s really having that supportive environment in addition to put in place both the conversation and the attitude and willingness to experiment that’s come together to make this so successful.

SARAH GREEN: Professor Perlow, thank you so much for joining us.

PROFESSOR LESLIE PERLOW: Thanks so much for having me.

SARAH GREEN: That was Leslie Perlow from the Harvard Business School. The article is “Making Time Off Predictable and Required,” in the October 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review. For more, visit harvardbusiness.org, and has always, enter your feedback to IdeaCast at harvardbusiness.org.